1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to physics simulation systems and more specifically to real-time breaking waves for shallow water simulations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Fluid simulation systems have undergone significant improvements recently with respect to visual accuracy in various settings, such as interactions between materials, phase changes, and multi-phase behavior, as seen in breaking waves. However, most of these improvements are not available to interactive, real-time environments, such as games. One major barrier to implementing recent techniques in real-time environments is a large computational throughput that is needed for solving full three-dimensional (3D) fluid motion, and tracing free surfaces for rendering.
One approach to increasing simulation performance is to reduce the problem from three dimensions to two dimensions. Instead of using 3D grid cells, a liquid is represented by a two-dimensional (2D) height field comprising 2D grid cells, each with an associated height. For calm situations (e.g., smooth waves and ripples), this representation can capture principle visual properties of a free surface fluid. However, for other more general situations, like breaking waves at a shoreline, a height field model does not capture important visual effects or a proper sense of motion.
As graphics applications develop greater visual richness and accuracy, breaking waves become a more important visual feature. However, current techniques for simulating breaking waves do not enable real-time simulation performance, forcing application developers to employ techniques that yield less desirable results (e.g., lower accuracy or sub real-time performance).
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a technique for efficiently simulating breaking waves for efficient real-time simulation.